The event consisted of a panel, dinner and a LightWalk amongst the winding streets of Lyon to directly engage and educate international journalists on issues of lighting in the nighttime environment.

Lyon is the third largest city in France. It is located between two rivers—Rhône & Saône—and is defined by rocky cliffs, castles and Roman ruins. Lyon’s Light Plan, the permanent illumination of more than 200 buildings and public places, was established in 1989. I had the opportunity to visit the city in 1995 and viewed the lighting strategy from which the Lighting Urban Communities International organization, (LUCI), was born.

Fête des Lumières spans four days in early December each year. The celebration has grown into an international event, with light shows and exhibitions by international artists and students. Attendance is said to reach four-million visitors annually. Each year a color theme is implemented with filters on the streetlights. In 2010 the streets of Lyon were bathed in hues of magenta-pink.

Now, as I write these words of recollection, my internal vision of the city of Lyon is drenched in this luscious color.

For a week crowds wander the streets in families, pairs, groups chatting, and light-gazing as they drink the traditional beverage, mulled wine,
sold street-side . As my companion observed, “I have never seen such crowds— except for sports or politics and here they all turn out for culture”.

NightSeeing™

The first step in the coordination of a NightSeeing™ LightWalk is the planning of the route. Generally booked by a conference or educational organization, in preparation, I dialogue with the local representative to devise a diverse, architecturally stimulating 10-minute itinerary— which becomes an hour-long when implemented on the Walk. For the Fête des Lumières, planning counterparts were Lyonnaise tour guide, Anne Prost, and adviser Alexandre Columbani, general manager of LUCI.

The festival has a sophisticated on-line presence with beautiful interactive maps and installation photographs. For weeks, I studied this swirl-framed program online program of the Fête.

This historic city is dense with alleys and pedestrian passageways paved with stones and lined with facades spanning the centuries. Selecting the route in a city founded by Romans in 43 BC — and now lauded for innovation is daunting! One challenge was to the LightWalk participants from the dense crowds; another was to include just a few spectacles. After all, an important concept for my LightWalk is the “normal”, typical nighttime light of the city.

Highlights of the Route

I developed a tour starting at the Hotel De Ville (the local government seat). Alexandre, an inhabitant of Lyon, introduced me to the area known as Croix-Rousse, a UNESCOWorld Heritage Site, in which silk weaving industry was introduced in 1536. This industry shaped unique architectural forms, such as the traboules—public spiral staircases. Protesting the introduction of new technology that would cause unemployment, throughout the 19th century, the silk workers known as canuts revolted and rioted.

Our guide Anne enumerated the local lore of the canuts and the silk suppliers to all of us—describing 16th through 19th-century psycho-geographical atmospheres and other facts that defined this district.

In the cold magenta night we gathered at the Roman Arena with its spiral of candles. We traversed up and down Lyon’s ubiquitous public stairs to see illuminated fabric sculptures and stood on the edge of the public square viewing translucent structures back-lit with geometric projections; and gazed upon varied and colorful lit-up baubles suspended from trees, facades and fences. More traditionally illuminated cathedrals and facades were also dotted along the route. Between spectacles I indulged on of my professional and private passions—pointing out the pedestrian signals—civic “jewelry“ of the city night—brightly blinking, their pink and black grille-work shadows intermingling with the people who cast them, as well as the lighted shop windows and many other “found”, vernacular effects of the urban nighttime environment.

The Panel Debate

The panel was located at the Philips Outdoor Lighting Application Centre in La Valbonne near Lyon. Starting of the day-long event, panelists Allan Stewart, Marco Bevolo, Dominique Mamcarz, Martin Lupton, Ken MacKenzie, Nicholas You, Rogier van der Heide, myself and Richard Griffiths, moderator, assembled in an intimate setting with reporters from media organizations from all over the world — including journalists from China, France, Italy, Korea, Singapore, Latvia, Spain and the United Kingdom — in the varied fields of business, technology and planning.

Nicholas described a moment in his childhood when he had to use the illumination of the street light to do his homework. Marco Bevolo stated that research is imperative to designed city strategies, and Allan Stewart (City Councilor in Glasgow) discussed “the power of light to unite people.” My colleague, lighting designer, Martin Lupton discussed our discipline, observing that, “Lighting is engaging. It is a social medium and it has the power to transform lives.”

———————————————–

“Haphazard planning, population growth and urban sprawl are taking a toll. If we continue at this rate, Asian cities would go the route of “maximum cities” where 20 million inhabitants (soon, this is the new “normal”) will fight for space to live, work and play.

“Light is playful. It has a sense of magic and people are attracted to light,” says Schwendinger, a New York-based lighting designer. Her forte is to use light in an imaginative and fun way that it serves as a catalyst to bring people together. “You can’t help it, you go towards the light.”

The message from the Lyon forum is simple: The only limit to creating great cities is your imagination. City planners, urban dwellers and governments all have a role to play by ensuring the development, projects and visions reflect exactly what the inhabitants want.

On the evening of December 9th I will be viewing the City of Lyon from the hilltop of Croix-Rousse. The city has layers upon layers of visible history from ancient to very modern. It will be a pleasure to present the light and shadows of Lyon to the exclusive attendees of Philips Livable Cities Initiative in the NightSeeing™ style.

Shanghai (上海)

From Suzhou the bullet train to Shanghai took 40 minutes. The view from the taxi window showcased a city festooned in scaffolding. The Shanghainese are preparing to welcome the world – 70 million visitors are expected — for Shanghai 2010 ” Better City, Better Life”, May through October 2010, by repairing facades and generally sprucing up. We sped along and entered a hardware and tool district – and then our hotel, Riverside Bund – just adjacent to the famed Bund (外滩), or Wei Tan District, busy with locals and tourists. The pre-1937 European-influenced Bund architecture is nestled on the banks of the Huang Pu River.

Martin Ma, YGLS

Martin Ma, a principal from Guangzhou Yang Guang Lighting Service Co. Ltd. (YGLS), headquartered in Guangzhou, joined us for the final leg of the journey. YGLS has multiple mandates; management of lighting projects (as owners’ representative), partners with Guangzhou Messe Frankfurt Exhibition (for Guangzhou International Lighting Technology Symposium), and Urban Planning and Design Institute of Tsinghua University (for educational forums). They organize overseas lighting tours to facilitate communication within the lighting industry and have established Yang Guang Lighting Designers Growth Foundation to support young Chinese lighting designers. Finally, YGLS publishes a lighting magazine,Yang Guang.

The first appointment was at the Tongji University Architectural Design and Research Institute. Mr.Zhou Jianfeng, Deputy General Architect and Yixiu Yang, Architect shared architectural projects – buildings and interiors, and I shared works of Light Projects and elaborated on my ideas for creative lighting approaches to infrastructure and public space. I went on a tour of the inventive, adventurous building where my host YGLS holds lighting seminars.

Sophisticated and vernacular Shanghai

After dinner in the center of Shanghai City, complimentsof Rock Hsuing of Roled Opto Electronics, an evening walk took us to visit Xintiandi (新天地) – literally Heaven on Earth, a jammed, fashionable nightlife district composed of adapted, reused and recreated warm-wood and -grey blocks of the Shikumen housing of early Shanghai. Framed within the antique walls and tiles is a highly programmed composition of galleries, bars, cafes and themed restaurants. The complex felt strangely sacrilegious – authentic and inauthentic – hard to put my finger on… and then it turns out…

The principal architect of Xintiandi is, not surprisingly, an American: Benjamin Wood, who once worked for Benjamin Thompson, the designer of Quincy Market. (Wood recently relocated from Boston to Shanghai.) Wood’s design is a clever mixture of renovated old buildings and new construction imitating the style of shikumen, the gray brick town houses that were built in many Shanghai neighborhoods beginning in the eighteensixties. Three-story structures built along narrow alleys, with elaborate, stone-carved entries leading into small interior courtyards, shikumen—the term means “stone gate”— generally housed upper-middle-class families. (Under Communist rule, shikumen were converted to tenements, and as many as seven families were shoehorned into them.) Like many buildings in cosmopolitan Shanghai, a shikumen combines Asian and Western influences; it is a Chinese home with a Parisian sensibility, a hybrid form both delicate and monumental.

The inspiration for the Xintiandi project was a gray brick building, no larger than a house, sitting in the middle of the site; it is where the Chinese Communist Party originally met, in 1921. (Mao himself attended the first meeting.) Vincent Lo, the developer who runs Shui On, was told by government officials that the buildings adjacent to the old meeting place had to be maintained, and that none of the garish commercialism that marks most Chinese retail establishments would be permitted beside it. – Paul Goldberger, New Yorker, “Shanghai Surprise “, 2005

I had the opportunity to visit the Shanghai EDAW office and meet a wide variety of urban designers, landscape designers, architects and planners; introduction compliments of my friend Chris Choa (who is quoted in the New Yorker article if you read it all the way through). James Lu welcomed me and a spirited discussion occurred about new cities in China and issues of public lighting.

Martin suggested to expect a great building for our next meeting at Zhongtai Lighting with Emma Jiang and Claudia Cai. I pictured an interesting building and an office within… as I walked up to the threshold of No. 58 Pan Yu Road preoccupied with the taxi ride through the French Concession and all the traffic, my view was filled with a tall silver and green surface – a living wall. Through the door, an astonishing view upward was framed on left, right and on the ground plane with sleek hanging gardens and water dripping and flowing. It was cool and majestic and I realized that this was not a normal “interesting” office building. And it dawned on me that Zhongtai was the only tenant…

Z58 is multi-functional – a design and events gallery, offices, and food service for those privileged to work and visit, and – amazing – two “6-star” bedrooms for visiting dignitaries. But the area I liked best was a setting of two Eames lounge chairs surrounded by a softly flowing rectilinear pool on the top floor with a view of the garden and Former Residence of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (上海孫中山故居紀念館 上海市) China’s doctor-leader known as the “National Father of modern China”.

Zhongtai calls itself “one of biggest professional lighting companies in China with offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou”.The lighting division is but one of a larger holding company with other divisions in construction and energy industries. It was Zhongtai Lighting that coordinated the work of French designer Roger Narboni in Hangzhou for the Grand Canal lighting master plan and subsequent implementation of his design.

On every trip outside the U.S. my partner and I visit the local bird market. At Shanghai’s Flower, Bird, Fish and Insect Market (花, 鸟, 鱼和昆虫市场) we spent an enchanted hour meeting the birds and their owners, inspecting the ceramic dishes and grains, feeding baby starlings and wondering about the phantasmagoria of crickets…. Here, I have found Mr. Xing-Bao Jin’s– Shanghai Institute of Entomology– invaluable website resource on Chinese Cricket Culture. In the baskets and little cages live the crickets who inspire by song and signal the seasons and seasonal activities (see images above).

Listen to the Cricket
by Bei Ju-Yi, Tang dynasty

The Singing cricket chirps throughout the long night, tolling in the cloudy autumn with its rain. Intent on disturbing the gloomy sleepless soul, the cricket moves towards the bed chirp by chirp. — from Chinese Cricket Culture

Shanghai Pudong International Airport: Terminal 2 designed by Richard Rogers Partnership, opened in 2003

June 18th: after an early morning visit to Gucheng Park (古代公园), Tai Chi and frantic packing – time to return to New York City. Shanghai / New York City the two are completely compatible. Can you love more than one city?

I had the pleasure of presenting Triple Bridge Gateway to the the LUCI General Meeting in November 2008 in the city of San Luis Potosi (Mexico), and ARUP LONDON just last week. Rogier van der Heide invited me to speak to Arups’ lighting, architectural and materials departments. They were a lively audience and had some good questions about the process of designing Triple Bridge including community outreach, technologies, and potential retrofits for the eight year old design.